The growth of electronic health record adoption continues strong across the industry, particularly among small healthcare organizations, because of the wide range of benefits and financial incentives provided by the U.S. Government. However, without a plan for implementation in place, businesses can end up wasting money without seeing those benefits.

The infographic below, created for Ohio University’s Online MHA Program, illustrates the benefits of EHRs along with how to reach them according to the HRSA’s recommended steps for implementation.

Application Programming Interfaces are up for discussion today, is this the future of interoperability with medical records? Anyone in the HIT/EHR business today can pretty much attest to the complexities that have evolved and is there anything or anyone to fault? Not really it is just the way it happened. Continue reading: Is HIT Interoperability in the Nature of Healthcare?

The Office of the ONC has begun putting together a plan to look and find areas where electronic medical records can cause harm to patients. Two agencies, the American Medical Association and the Texas Medical Association have made comments and suggestions. iHealthBeat has done a nice job providing a summary of the recommendations made by each. Continue reading: AMA and TMA Comment on ONC Patient Safety Plan

Today we are featuring an opinion piece written by Edmund Billings, MD, CFO of Medsphere. The company has been in business since 2002. The company markets an EMR that was converted from VistA to OpenVista. They took the original system from the Veteran’s Administration and created a commercial version of the software suitable for use outside the VA. Here’s a short description of what they do followed by his article about the the high costs of Healthcare IT systems today. Continue reading: A Tale of Two Studies: What are the actual costs of an EHR?